We Spoke To 2 Veterans Who Served In World War II As Teenagers — And Here's What They Remember Most

Of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II, just over
a million are alive today, according to the National
World War II Museum. Each day, 555 of them die.

Business Insider recently spoke with two combat veterans who grew
up in New York City and fought in the Pacific as teenagers near
the war's end. Bob Mulcahy and Victor Westiner are easy to find;
they meet twice a week for coffee with a handful of other aging
veterans in the basement of their local American Legion post in St.
James, New York.

"It's mostly camaraderie," Mulcahy said of the twice-weekly
meetings. "It's like a men's club. Most of them lost their
wives."

They'll tell old war stories or banter over the latest sports
news. "It's a good feeling," Mulcahy said.

'For Me It Was Like Watching A John Wayne Movie'

That's how Mulcahy describes the sights and sounds he witnessed
for 59 days aboard the USS New Orleans off the coast of Okinawa,
during the last major battle of World War II in spring
1945.

Bob Mulcahy at
17.Bob Mulcahy

Bob Mulcahy grew up in Queens and joined the U.S. Navy in October
1944 at 17. He followed in the footsteps of his older brother,
who joined a month after the Japanese launched a surprise aerial
attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the event that brought
the U.S. into World War II.

The USS New Orleans arrived off the coast of Okinawa in mid-April
1945, while the Marines were still fighting a bloody battle to
wrest the island out of Japanese hands.

"Everything to me was like a moving picture, because the first
day we got there that sky was all full of the smoke from the
cannons going off and from the planes," Mulcahy recalled.

He normally served as a radar operator in the ship's combat
information center (CIC), the "eyes and ears" of the ship. But
whenever the ship came under attack, Mulcahy served on an
elevated lookout deck where he watched for kamikaze planes —
aircraft flown by Japanese pilots trying to intentionally crash
into U.S. ships.

American planes formed a defensive ring around the ships to
protect them from kamikazes, who mostly targeted aircraft
carriers but could occasionally go after heavy cruisers like
Mulcahy's ship. They never hit the USS New Orleans, although one
flew so close past Mulcahy's lookout tower that he could see the
pilot in the cockpit.

Although the heavy cruiser was in the middle of the fray, it
sustained damage on only one occasion, when the captain brought
the ship closer than usual to bombard Japanese shore batteries.

"You can see the guys running up and down the beaches," Mulcahy
recalled.

During the maneuver, a Japanese gun emplacement fired back and
hit the rear deck of the ship, wounding at least one sailor with
shrapnel, Mulcahy recalls.

Here with his USS New
Orleans crewmates, Bob Mulcahy is seated in the center of the
bottom row.Bob
Mulcahy

Mulcahy's most memorable act of the war came when he received an
order that was rare for a 5-foot-7, 121-pound, 17-year-old
nicknamed "Chick" on account of his young age and small stature.

He was in the CIC mapping the progress of the front line as
Marines advanced into Okinawa when a commander approached
him.

"He says, 'Hey sailor how we doing today?'" Mulcahy recalled. "I
say, 'I guess all right, sir.' He says, 'OK come over here, I
want to start firing at the beach.' Again, I'm 17 years old,
just out of high school."

The commander communicated with the ship's crewmembers in charge
of aiming and firing its massive naval guns, while Mulcahy
relayed precise instructions from a spotter aircraft for
adjusting their aim. Then he felt the whole ship shake as its
nine biggest guns fired simultaneously at the coast.

"They make a lot of noise," he now says with a laugh.

Through his ongoing communication with the spotter plane, Mulcahy
learned his ship was firing on a Japanese column moving along a
road containing about 300 enemy troops and three tanks. His
coordination with the plane ensured the column's
destruction.

"After we destroyed them completely, the pilot said, 'Job well
done, there's nothing left of that place.' So I said to myself,
'Well, I did my part in the war, rather than just being a
lookout.'

"I think anybody that enlisted during that wartime are all
heroes, because nobody knew what was coming when they joined up,"
Mulcahy recalled. "My brother joined up and for four years was in
Florida. I was in 10 weeks and I was on my way to Okinawa at that
time. So you don't know where you're going to go."

Nowadays, Mulcahy is the commander of the American Legion
Sherwood Brothers Post 1152. "Every day I get a notice one of my
shipmates has passed away, almost every day," he said. "It's
pretty sad, with the statistics and all."

'Not Everybody Came Back'

Victor Westiner repaired damaged P-51 Mustang fighter planes at
an Iwo Jima airfield. The fighters flew missions to the Japanese
mainland that sometimes lasted up to 16 hours.

Westiner, now 90, grew up in Brooklyn and was drafted into the
military in January 1943, shortly after his 19th birthday.
Because he had learned aircraft maintenance at a technical
school, Westiner was placed in the U.S. Army Air Corps and became
an aircraft mechanic in a P-51 fighter aircraft unit.

He landed on Iwo Jima in late March 1945, after the Marines had
captured an airfield from the Japanese for the mechanics to
operate on. "The beach was a mess. It was filled with holes and
debris and wrecks" — and bodies, Westiner recalled.

Victor Westiner with one
of the P-51 Mustang fighter planes he helped maintain and
repair.Victor
Westiner

The P-51s typically provided protective escorts for American B-29
Superfortress bombers on their way to Japan, but Westiner also
helped equip the fighter planes with new rockets, which they
routinely fired at Japanese railroad tunnels.

"Of course, not everybody came back," he said. Other fighters
returned to base with damage that Westiner and his fellow
mechanics fixed by riveting metal patches over the holes.

He and his comrades lived in two-person tents, commonly known in
the military as "pup tents."

Westiner experienced two Japanese air raids, but they were
ineffectual and had little impact on the base. "One was
very, very poor for them because we had some pretty good
antiaircraft guns all over the island," Westiner said. "The Army
came in with a bunch of these anti-aircraft, and they hit one or
two and of course they crashed in an area that we knew about."

Victor Westiner on Iwo
Jima in 1945.Victor
Westiner

Nevertheless, he recalled some casualties on the American side
from rare air raids.

"We had a couple of guys killed. They had these little
anti-personnel bombs. It's a small bomb and the shrapnel, believe
it or not, was old nails, razor blades, all kinds of junk in a
shell that would blow up and spread out."

On other occasions, Japanese bombers came near the airfield but
never attacked, although it was enough to send Westiner and his
comrades running for cover in foxholes after the alarms sounded.
"Of course, they kept everybody awake," he recalled.

But those losses were minimal compared with those inflicted on
the last remnants of Japanese troops hiding out in caves beneath
the island.

An Army unit was assigned to blow up the caves to prevent
Japanese holdouts from launching guerrilla attacks on the
airfield.

The Americans made the few survivors they found strip down at a
safe distance before taking them prisoner. "They had grenades and
tried to blow themselves up," Westiner said.

Westiner recalls seeing only two Japanese stragglers surrender,
after they were forced out of the caves from heat and
dehydration.

"I don't think they had hardly any prisoners at all. The Army
guys had captured these two who had come out of a cave and they
were a short distance from where we were, and they were taking
them away," Westiner remembered.

During the war, Westiner felt lucky to be able to pursue his
interest in aircraft while serving his country, "even though it
was not in a very nice area," he said with a laugh. He was less
interested in the intricacies of the war. "I didn't really care
either way at that age ... probably some at the time, but I
really don't remember."

Victor Westiner, left, and
Bob Mulcahy at their American Legion post in St. James, New
York.Corey Adwar